MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON ROM time to time I am reproached by an anonymous cor- respondent for over-indulgence in relative, clauses. His method is to detach this page from the body of the -"Spectator and to underline in pen and ink every " which " or " that " employed. He then places this maculate sheet in an envelope and sends it to me without further comment. He is `tot a pitiless man, since sometimes he will realise the difficulty of avoiding these ugly little words ; he will then make suggestions of his own. If I have written " of which 'or " to which,' he will propose neatly in the margin the horrible archaic alteinatives of ta whereof " or " whereto.' Surely he must realise by now that it would be unnatural, and indeed obnoxious, for me to use these fusty escapes ; he might as well expect me to indulge in morris dancing and to clap and prance with other hey-nonny-noes along the village street. I do not think he is a professional grammarian, since his handwriting indicates the humanist : I assume rather that he is a man of culture who has allowed the word " which " to get upon his nerves. I am sure that, if he could rid himself of his obsession, he would agree with me that the relative clause is essential.to our English ways of thought and expression. The language of this country is not, as is the French language, a canal . cutting straight from point to point between cemented banks. It is not, as was the Latin language, a hard highway, lapidary and rectilinear, composed of carefully laid blocks. It is not, as was the Greek language, a fresh stream splashing with gay bubbles and otiose particles down hot limestone rocks. No, the English language is a slow and gentle river, somewhat sluggish amid the flag-irises and the reeds, winding in and out of the lush meadows, lingering in shaded backwaters, describing in the course of its unhurried progress many a loop and curve, and making quite unnecessary expeditions to visit some hanging beech-wood or to allow the tower of a village church to be reflected in its stream. All this, as my correspondent should admit, entails many a " which " and that These words are only ugly when one starts observing them. * * * * My own grievance against the English language, against the " patrii sermons egestas," is that it provides so few easily handled alternatives to the first person singular. It is disagreeable to em- ploy the word " I " too frequently, since "le moi est hassable." Yet what means of escape do we, when narrating a personal ex- perience, actually possess? We have ,nothing really to correspond to the French "on, since our English " one " is an ungainly tool, lacking flexibility. It is perfectly feasible to say " one enters the house through a wrought-iron gate " ; but the moment the pos- sessive (" one's first impression is," etc.) intrudes into the sentence, much stumbling results, and the complications induced by such developments as " once one allows oneself," etc., are an agony to the stylist's soul. " One cannot always," wrote Matthew Arnold, " be studying one's works," but one should at last be vigilant with oneself to see that one does not use " ohe " , too much. Moreover, I have a distaste for the term " one " when it is employed from false modesty ; nobody can really care for " sometimes one manages somehow to bring it off " as a para- phrase for " I did jolly well." The word " we," again, is not a substitute for " I " when the experience related is essentially a personal experience and not shared by the mass of mankind. I happen to hate the word we " as an alternative to the first person singular, since it is insincere, implying a group-comrade- ship that may not exist. Thus, since " one " is clumsy and " we " abhorrent, back we fall on the small word " I."
* * * * Never, until last Wednesday, had I been to Battersea Park. I had heard the name mentioned in my childhood, since, for some reason that I am unable to explain, it was this remote pleasance that was employed as a velodrome by my aunts and uncles. Even as in Paris during the early 'nineties grown men and women would drive down to the Bpis de Boulogne in order to enjoy an hour's bicycling, so also in London in-the last years of Queen Victoria's reign would the upper and the middle classes transport their machines to Battersea Park and pedal round and round. I was not invited to take part in such expeditions ; but the name lingered in my memory as a place of adventure and achievement. I used, as the Continental boat-train slid into Victoria, to glance down to my left upon the trees that marked the unvisited meadows of my childhood and the end of my journey abroad. But never, until last Wednesday, did I have the enterprise to cross the bridges and to stroll in the green valleys where once my uncles and my aunts would bicycle for an hour up and down. I admit that when I at last entered the shaded grove I was astonished at its splendour and spaciousness. It was dark at the time, and the perspectives may have been elongated and exaggerated in the dusk. But during the long country walk that I was obliged to take from and to the distant car-park, it appeared to me that heavy avenues stretched out illimitable to right and left, that between them wide plains opened, and that here and there stood vast lakes, interspersed with islands, and resonant with the sleepy grunts and stirrings of the wildest fowl. Why, I asked myself, had Unever been to Battersea Park before?
In one corner of this vast open space a cluster of lights glittered. Here were the fun fair, the amusement park, and the Festival Gardens, designed with such ingenuity and high spirits by Mr. John Piper and Mr. Osbert Lancaster. The immediate approaches to these clustering Hyades were gay with coloured lamps, and the trees that bordered on the entrances were lit from below, making their branches appear artificial objects, glistening like green tin. Strange it was that, in place of what the Laureate has well called " shadows of plane-trees under lamps," the shadows should be thrown upwards away from the flag-stones and up among the watching stars. Such fantasy is a fitting intro- duction to the gardens themselves. I arrived prepared to find reality turned upside-down and to lose for an hour or so the leaden weight of sadness that hangs inside the ribs. I strolled about the fair, holding in my hand a rod of brown paper garlanded with spun sugar, an emblem as sweet and propitiatory as any olive-branch entwined with clean white wool. I watched men and women being hurled through space in flying boats or little chariots ; I admired the obelisks, the pavilions and the wicker statues ; and by the end I found myself looking down on the Thames again, on the old brown river that had never witnessed such goings-on since the distant days of Vauxhall Gardens or Cremome. I was induced by my companions to attend the curious spectacle of adult men and women gathering, together in 'a rounded drum and allowing themselves thereafter to be strung and plastered along the walls of this drum, like a frieze of paper-mache figures, by centrifugal force. The observers of this strange ceremony moved in a Dantesque circle round the spirals that encircled the building, gazing down upon the contorted shapes in the pit below, and keeping time to the insistent music by tapping their palms upon the balustrade.
* * I escaped from this voodoo sight, out into the calm and quiet of the gardens with the sound of subdued voices underneath the trees and the splash of fountains falling. How entrancing to me are the eccentricities of my fellow-mortals.! How delightful it is that women of middle age can expose themselves to be whirled around in a wooden drum, so that their skirts are clamped stiff upon them, pleated as the draperies of the Victory of Samothrace. How pleasant that elderly gentlemen should stroll about eating spun sugar from a cardboard rod ! How delightful that aged humanists should spend time underlining in a newspaper article every " which " or " that."
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